“The state of the country when the tories left”. It was the Tories who took this nationalised, militant unionised, “sick man of Europe” into the modern era under Maggie. Yes they made economic mistakes, exchange rate mechanism et al, and yes they had problems with sleaze when they were rightly booted out. But Brown Inherited an economy that had grown since 1993, he has then presided over it with some aplomb, but he has sold all our Gold, decimated the pension funds and allowed personal debt to esculate to dangerous levels. We have all enjoyed the prosperity of living on credit, but very soon the bubble will burst.

If you want to talk about leaving the country in a real state cast your mind back to 1979.

I don’t like EU jobsworths any more than you do but my concern is that Cameron would only have the UK tooting on the fringe. I don’t agree with his pledge to remove Conservative MEPs from the EPP. That will accomplish little.

Brown’s the man for Britain on the international stage. I look forward to the day when Prime Minister Brown and President Hillary Clinton (most likely to be the Democratic nominee) providing effective global leadership on a range of global issues.

The sooner someone insists that these unelected jobsworths in Brussels get on and do something useful, rather than dreaming of a bigger desk in The United States of Europe the better.
And Dave could be the man to do it.

Yes of course the cost of taxing the plane will be passed on to customers.That is the point of the excercise! We have to wind down our use of fossil fuels pronto.They’re a declining resource & probably contributing to global warming.

The Stern report-commissioned by GB-stated that this will not happen until carbon is priced . That’s what consumers respond to. We’ll all have to get used to it. THe best approach to date IMHO is Carbon Cap & Trade-operating in EU as ETS-and now being adopted in USA at state level-notably in California.
It imposes a cap on upstream( producer) emissions & makes them pay for breaches. THis will drive the low/no carbon technical innovation you quite rightly urge , because consumers of high carbon content/high price products & services will demand cheaper alternatives & so high carbon using suppliers will see their costs rise & business lost to technically innovative competitors.
However ETS is slow in being introduced & it’s not yet rolled out to aviation.THe Conservatives want to speed this up and stop issuing carbon permits free-they want an auction. THis fixes the carbon price in producer costs and provides “green” revenue for governments to redistribute.
Until this gets sorted ,green taxes which identify & increase carbon price to the consumer are a good move-provided they are ring fenced for re-distribution as the Conservatives pledge-and not used as a general revenue raiser as Gordon did with APT.
Stern’s plea for a pricing of Carbon gels with the Conservative philosophy of customer choice. I don’t believe that central edicts from Whitehall about technical innovation, and tax breaks with your money & mine are the answer.